John Maeda wrote the Laws of Simplicity, a great little book that breaks down what it means to be simple. In March he gave this talk at the TED conference:

He boils down to the following nugget:

“Simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain.”

For more about his laws, check out my series of posts or buy the book at Amazon.

Thanks for pointing me to this, Mr. Duffy.

The folks at Trizoko pose a simple question:

Who would likelier succeed?
a) Johnny starting with a “I’ll-rock-the-world” approach.
b) Miguel, who starts with a “just-enough” approach.

Miguel, they say, has the best chance of succeeding, because “A simplicity approach exponentially increases your chances of achieving your primary goals.”

While I agree, I’d point out that this approach is popular with incrementalists. Completionists would probably freak out, and rightly so.

Launching with the bare minimum means the first impression is less than your full potential. That’s why you have to make sure that what you launch contains the core of your product. This is the first thing the incrementalist needs to focus on.

The next thing is appeasing the completionist. The core might not be enough for staunch completionists. Remind them that you can’t wait forever to get it out, and promise to work on their list once you launch.

Via Duffster, who may be a busy man, but always finds time to send me links about Simplicity.

Like them. That’s it.

As a friend recently said…

“I guess we are the crazies who don’t mind clients. I think clients are the number one complaint when it comes to design.”

They’re hardly crazy. They just know how to keep customers.

Once you like your customers, the rest falls into place. You will naturally do the things that show your appreciation, and that will come back to you.

Whatever you do, don’t follow the lead of Randal from the movie Clerks (slightly edited):

“This job would be great if it wasn’t for the… customers.”

If you’re having a hard time liking your customers, that’s probably a sign that you need to find better customers (or another field).

Do humans return better search results than computers? Yes, actual intelligence beats the artificial kind. But computers are really good at aggregating what humans have created.

There’s talk about social search being the next wave. Google already uses social search. They call it PageRank, and it’s why they are number one right now. It changed the game, and aggregated our opinions about sites in a usable way.

Social search may be the past, but it is also the future, as long as computers are still involved:

1. With the web opening up, human-filtered content will become more available to search engines. Check out the one result search query for an example.
2. Personalization is another method to filter what humans are already creating. See Greg Linden’s recent post characterizing value of personalized search. Linden wrote the first Amazon recommendation system.
3. Leveraging what my friends like might be the purest form of social search. For this to work, it’s going to take more than me sharing a single link. Sites I have liked need to help my friend without my immediate intervention. While social networks might appear best poised, it’s going to take data, so someone like del.icio.us is actually closer than Facebook, for example.

As much as some might despise game-able algorithms determining search results, that’s not going away. Even with social search, we still need the computers to do the heavy lifting.